by Ben Counter
Slowly, the shape of the Titan's torso sagged. Its face began to melt, the immense heat of the plasma boring through its layers of armour. Even the Titan's miraculous self-repairing facilities could do nothing against power of that magnitude.
'See?' said Alaric. 'You wanted destruction. Here it is.'
A white light burned out through the Titan's chest as the plasma vessel failed completely. The Titan rippled as if suddenly liquid and then it was consumed in an expanding ball of hot, unbearable light, so bright it melted the surfaces of the Titans that stood nearby.
A hot wind blasted across the titan works, bringing with it the death-scream of the father of god-machines.
As the flare of the explosion died away, Alaric looked down at the Castigator's head. The flame finally flickered out and the crushing pressure on Alaric's mental shield eased. The Castigator was dead.
'No,' said Urkrathos. 'No.'
The sensor-daemon gleefully replayed the image. The Titan, built from a pure Standard Template Construct, from which could be copied the ultimate weapon - melting into slag and then exploding, right beneath the Hellforger as Urkrathos looked on.
'This... this is an insult!' Urkrathos slammed a fist into the sensor-daemon, shattering the pict-screen and sending the daemon recoiling in pain. 'To entreat upon Abaddon himself, to lure me here... and now this! What insubordination is this, to defy a chosen of Abaddon?'
Ukrathos turned to glare at the rest of the bridge. The daemons were silent, for they knew one of Urkrathos's killing rages when they saw it. 'The Despoiler was promised a tribute.' said Urkrathos, anger dripping from every word. 'And a tribute he will get. A tribute in blood! In death! In fire! Close the ports and move to mid-atmosphere! All power to the lance batteries!'
* * *
SILHOUETTED AGAINST THE afterglow of the Titan's death, two figures approached. Alaric knew them even before his vision compensated for the glare - Brothers Haulvarn and Dvorn, scorched but alive.
'Well met, brothers.' said Alaric bleakly. 'I see you were successful.'
'Well met, justicar.' said Haulvarn. 'Dvorn found a maintenance run down to the knee, so we threw a couple of melta-bombs into the core and got out, I was wondering if it would work.'
'And I was wondering.' said Dvorn, indicating the quickly decaying mass of flesh that had been the Castigator, 'if you would leave anything of this creature for me.'
'Sorry to disappoint you, brother. The daemon and myself had matters to settle.'
Haulvarn's head snapped round at the sound of tracks approaching. Alaric followed his gaze and saw one of the steaming, beweaponed engines from the earlier battle, the size of a Rhino APC and bristling with guns and blades. The last Alaric had seen they had been running rampant around the titan works after Scraecos had died - now one was heading straight for them. The Grey Knights took aim with their storm bolters as it approached, backing off before it opened fire.
'Hold!' shouted Alaric as he saw the limp body held in the claws jutting from the engine's front armour. 'Hold fire!'
The figure was Hawkespur. Through her faceplate, Alaric could see her skin was almost white.
'She's still alive.' said a distorted voice from the engine.
'Antigonus.' Somehow, Alaric wasn't surprised Magos Antigonus had made it. He had taken a thousand years of what Chaeroneia could throw at him - he was the toughest of them all in his own way. When the Warhound had died he must have leapt into the closest machine, which apparently happened to be one of the Dark Mechanicus war engines.
'Your battle-brother Cardios is dead.' said Antigonus, his voice warped by the crude vocabulator unit on the engine. 'The tech-guard too. They were taking stray fire from the Titan and they threw themselves on her to protect her.'
Alaric sped to the engine - Hawkespur's breathing was shallow and though her wound had been crudely dressed, she was still bleeding. 'She won't last long,' he said.
'Neither will we.' replied Antigonus. 'The sensors on this thing aren't good but it looks like there are Mechanicus troops approaching from the direction of the city and the spaceship above us is rising to firing altitude. Get yourself and your brothers on board, justicar, this machine can go faster than you can on foot.'
'Then we will pray for Cardios later.' Alaric turned to Haulvarn and Dvorn. 'Get on board. Stay alert and hold on.'
'And make it quick.' added Antigonus. 'I think there might still be something in here with me.'
The three surviving Grey Knights swung themselves onto the spiked body of the war engine, Alaric feeling the full extent of his injuries for the first time. But his own wounds didn't matter. The Castigator was destroyed, the power that ruled Chaeroneia was broken and there were many prayers to say for the dead. Antigonus gunned the engine's tracks and it tore rapidly towards the closest edge of the titan works, leaving the melting slag of the Castigator's Titan behind. And above them, the Chaos grand cruiser was rising through the layers of pollution, massive laser lance projectors emerging from its underside.
THE COLLECTIVE MIND of Chaeroneia's tech-priests was at an utter loss. The sequence of events had been so rapid and unexpected that they could not make sense of them. The Castigator's awakening and destruction, the Chaos spacecraft hanging above them, the death of Scraecos, the battle in the fallen Titan, the awesome psychic force that had exploded from the Castigator Titan and had been cut short. There were thousands of explanations being bounced between the ruling minds of Chaeroneia, none of them satisfactory, many of them heretical.
The laser lances being readied by the Chaos grand cruiser were just one more complication. They were added to the confusing mess of contradictions and absurdities and were barely remarked upon by the tech-priests right up until the moment they fired.
THE HOT ASH wind whipped past Alaric as Antigonus drove the war engine across the dunes. He looked back towards the receding titan works, still dominating the ash desert with their watch-towers and legions of Titans, crowned by the central spire and still under the shadow of the Chaos spaceship.
A finger of hot ruby light slashed down, punching through the disk at the top of the central spire. White flickers of explosions ripped through the structure. Then another beam fell and another, edging the towers of the titan works with crimson. Suddenly, every weapon on the Chaos ship opened up as one, bathing the titan works in red laser fire. The central spire exploded, the raging finger of flame quickly swallowed by plasma explosions as the lances punched down through the assembled Titans and penetrated the fuel reservoirs beneath the surface.
The destruction of the titan works took just a few minutes, the awesome weight of lance fire from the Chaos cruiser supplemented by orbital bombardment shells and weapons batteries. The watchtowers shattered and the moat boiled away. The Titans fell like executed men and the surrounding dunes were washed with waves of heat and flame.
Antigonus kept control as the ground shook. Alaric held on as the Shockwaves died down and the fires continued to burn, consuming the lower levels of the titan works and finishing the destruction of the Castigator's lair.
The shadow slowly lifted off the desert as the Chaos ship rose into higher orbit, ready to return back to the vacuum of space. Abaddon's tribute had not been delivered and the Chaos ship had exacted revenge for the failure.
The ash clouds slowly blotted out the sight of the shattered titan works and the engine ground further into the desert, away from Manufactorium Noctis.
INQUISITOR NYXOS PAUSED over the large leather-bound book, quill in hand. The reports given by Alaric and the other Grey Knights would take some time to write up and the implications were extraordinary. Someone would have to explain to all authorities concerned how the mission to Chaeroneia had found a hallowed Standard Template Construct and then destroyed it. And Nyxos knew that someone would be him.
Nyxos's quarters on the Exemplar were in one of the few undamaged sections of the ship. The Mechanicus cruiser had been shattered by fire from the Chaos ship that h
ad duelled with it, and would have surely been destroyed had the Chaos fleet not broken off and headed down to the planet's surface. That fleet was now long gone, having moved with all haste to jump distance and disappeared into the warp. The Exemplar had been in no shape to follow and was still in high orbit around Chaeroneia waiting for a Naval ship to reach it and evacuate the survivors of the Mechanicus crew. The quarters were cold and cramped, but Nyxos did not mind a little hardship when he had so nearly died along with countless crew in the battle above Chaeroneia. It had only been his augmentations and redundant organs that had kept him alive when the verispex decks had depressurised and as far as he knew no one on the same deck had been so fortunate.
There was a knock at the door. 'Enter.' said Nyxos.
The door slid open and Justicar Alaric walked in. Even without his armour he was huge, almost filling the room. The candlelight glinted off the dried blood that edged the scars on his long, noble face and there were livid bruises around his eyes. Normally they were expressive and inquisitive, especially compared to most other Space Marines - now they were just tired.
'Ah, justicar. I am glad you could see me.' said Nyxos, looking up from his report. 'I hope I have not intruded on your prayers.'
'There will be plenty of time to pray, inquisitor.'
'Regretfully so. I will join you and your battle-brothers soon, I would say some words for them myself. We might never fully understand how greatly their sacrifice protected the Imperium. Please, sit.'
Alaric sat down wearily on the chair opposite Nyxos. It took a lot to tire out a Space Marine, but Alaric had clearly been through enough on Chaeroneia to kill most men a dozen times over. 'I was concerned about the interrogator.' he said.
'Hawkespur is stable.' replied Nyxos. 'She is very badly injured. She lost a lot of blood and the pollutants affected her gravely. Perhaps she will live, perhaps she will not. Magos Thulgild has made her care the highest priority and she will have a good chance if I can get her to Inquisition facilities before she deteriorates. In truth, I am surprised she made it back at all. I was certain I would never see her again.'
'And Antigonus?'
'Still in quarantine. Thulgild is fascinated that Antigonus seems to have survived in information form alone. It is alarming to me, too, but Antigonus has submitted to all Magos Thulgild's tests and there is no indication of corruption. He requests to be taken back to Mars and Thulgild has agreed.'
'It was his mission.' said Alaric. 'To investigate Chaeroneia and report back to the Fabricator General. He wants to make sure he fulfils it.'
Nyxos sat back in his chair and sighed. So many were dead and so many more questions had to be answered. 'Meanwhile, justicar, my mission is to tell the Ordo Malleus what happened down there. And I admit I do not fully understand it myself. This creature, this Castigator. It was a daemon, you say?'
'Yes. I do not know when it entered the Standard Template Construct, or how, but it seemed to have been there so long it had forgotten what it really was. Until I... reminded it.'
'And it was a daemon all along?'
'Of course. How could it not be?'
'No one knows what form the Standard Template Constructs originally took. Who is to say they did not have machine-spirits of their own, true intelligences far more powerful than anything that survives today?'
'No, inquisitor. I fought it. I felt it. When it realized what it was, it rejoiced in it. It might not have been a daemon the Ordo Malleus would recognise, but the shapes of the Enemy are many. Evil takes an infinity of forms, but justice is constant.'
'Very well. If you are certain, justicar, then so am I. When I can get an astropathic message to the Ordo, there will be one more entry in the Liber Daemonicum.' Nyxos took up his quill again. 'Thank you, justicar. I have kept you from your prayers for too long.'
'By your leave.' said Alaric, rising from his seat and leaving the chamber.
Nyxos continued writing. He would have to recite it all before the conclave of lord inquisitors and suffer their interrogations until they knew everything he did. He did not begrudge it, but this would be difficult to explain. A daemon in information form, the return of the Dark Mechanicus and a corrupt Standard Template Construct. Yes, their questions would be many.
And then there was Alaric himself. He was intelligent, curious and imaginative. They were qualities normally buried by the training of a Grey Knight, but when confronted with the foulest of enemies, they shone through in Alaric. That was why Alaric had convinced the Castigator to take on daemon's flesh when any other Grey Knight would just have died screaming prayers. Probably the Grand Masters of the Grey Knights saw it as something unstable and unwanted and would keep Alaric from ever attaining the rank of brother-captain that he deserved. But Nyxos had seen enough of Alaric's qualities to know that perhaps there was some other role he could serve within the Inquisition, where a sharp mind and a Space Marine's body could be put to best use.
But those were matters for another time. For the moment, Nyxos would have to make sure he had answers for the lord inquisitors.
DEEP ON HOLY Mars, the world sacred to the Omnissiah and spiritual heart of the tech-priesthood, a mighty labyrinth lay below the rust-red surface. It was forgotten, deliberately so, by all but the highest echelons of the Adeptus Mechanicus. Those to whom the archmagi ultima bowed, those who had the ear of the Fabricator General, knew of its existence and they jealously guarded that knowledge well. All but a handful of men and women in the Imperium were incapable of even imagining the weight of secrets it contained.
The Standard Template Constructs were sacred rumours among the tech-priests, any scrap of information concerning them a holy revelation. And all those scraps were gathered, filtered through the most ancient and powerful logic engines, dissected and assembled and placed in the gene-locked data vaults that lined the walls of the labyrinth. Reaching deep into the crust of Mars, the archive contained information concerning the Standard Template Constructs, some of it older than the Imperium itself. And every few centuries, after decades of debate among the very highest circles of the tech-priesthood, something new would be added.
A new vault was assigned and coded and the information was typed into it in pure binary by one of those ancient, hooded figures who were closer to the Omnissiah than anyone who lived. That information concerned a world named Chaeroneia and the Standard Template Construct that had been found and lost there. It was the STC for the most awesome of technologies - the Titan, the god-machine - and it had been, according to all the data gathered, pure and complete as no STC had ever been before. But it had been used for the ends of the Enemy, twisted into a weapon of Chaos by a monstrous daemon of the warp. And so was the lesson illustrated – none but the Adeptus Mechanicus could comprehend the majesty of the Standard Template Constructs and the purity of the knowledge they contained, none but a tech-priest, stripped of his humanity by his devotion to the Omnissiah, could be trusted with the enormity of such information.
The vault was sealed and consecrated and the picture became a little clearer. One day the Adeptus Mechanicus would attain complete understanding of the galaxy and the grand design of the Omnissiah, using the Standard Template Constructs as a guide to His divine methods. One day the STCs would all be completely reassembled, as pure as the Titan STC should have been had the Enemy not abused it and so threatened everything the Mechanicus existed to protect. It was the quest that had consumed the Priesthood of Mars ever since the Dark Age of Technology had given way to the Age of Strife, long before the Emperor arose and united mankind in the Imperium. It was a quest that consumed every tech-priest and menial every moment of their lives and drove them closer to their Omnissiah in their zeal to understand.
It took many normal lifetimes to become close enough to the Omnissiah to accept the truth that lay at the heart of their teachings. Only the highest, those who knew of the archive and its contents, could do so. And so they all knew, as somehow they had always known, that their que
st would never end.
